The Necklace

by Carla Kelly

  “I am afraid.”

  “You are my true knight, and this is but a small moment in God’s eyes. That is what you have always told me. Do you believe it?”

  He nodded and took the necklace. “I should call his name?”

  “Yes.”

  She gave him a reassuring pat and he stood up. The mother cat and kitten jumped out of his doublet, and the soldiers laughed.

  “Ana, what…”

  As calmly as she could manage, and as quickly, Ana told Santiago about the necklace, and El Ghalib’s promise at the river, given in gratitude for doing what he could not do for a beloved sister. “Don’t be angry with me, Santiago. I should have told you sooner,” she told her husband, then looked away. “Perhaps we weren’t on the best of terms then, you and I.”

  “We were not,” he said. His breath came slower and slower. “Angry? Not now. You can bargain for your life with that necklace. I am grateful.”

  “That wasn’t the bargain I had in mind, dear man. Here he is.”

  Pushing Pablo in front of him, Yussef el Ghalib stood beside them, looking down. He relieved her heart by kneeling in the snow. He was wrapped against the weather with only his eyes showing, but she recognized Jawhara’s eyes.

  He showed her the necklace, then put it around his neck, working it inside his tunic. “Tell me what you wish,” he said. “Be quick. I trust no one.”

  But not too quick, she thought. Let us give Antonio time to get everyone through the pass. She decided to burst into tears, which wasn’t hard, not at all. She wanted to weep for every moment lost, never to be, with this hard, obsessed, determined man she had been forced to marry, not of her choice. Things had changed. How was she going to manage without him?

  “Come, come, Señora Gonzalez,” El Ghalib said, his patience wearing thin. “Tell me. What is your wish?”

  She dried her eyes, taking her time. “It is this, Yussef el Ghalib: Please allow my husband to die peacefully in my arms.”

  “No, Ana, no,” Santiago said, his words starting to slur together. “Ask for safe passage for you and Pablo from this killing field.”

  “It is my wish, husband, and not yours,” she reminded him. “This is what I choose.”

  “You might want to reconsider,” el Ghalib told her.

  “I don’t care what happens to me,” she said. “When this good man is dead, you may do with me as you choose.”

  “Ana, no.”

  “Hush, Santiago. And when he is dead, this enemy of yours, Yussef, please see that his body and that of his brother, tied to his horse over there, are buried at Las Claves in the graveyard.”

  “Nothing for yourself?”

  “I would like one small thing.” She smiled briefly. “I have decided I like small things.”

  “Speak then, wife of my enemy.”

  “Bury Santiago next to the little mound with a wooden marker that reads, ‘Fermina.’”

  “Who might that be?” el Ghalib asked, more softly.

  “Our daughter, Santiago’s and mine.” she said. “She was four months in my womb, then no more. Please, sir.”

  El Ghalib sat back on his heels. “I didn’t know.” He stood up and looked down at Santiago, as if debating what to do.

  “Please, señor,” she said. “You promised me one favor.”

  “I did, but you have asked for more.”

  “So I have,” she said. “Please.”

  Santiago opened his eyes. “I can’t see anything,” he whispered.

  She cried, her tears dropping on his chest, but he didn’t feel them. El Ghalib knelt once more by the dying man. “Santiago, what an enemy you have been! Las Claves is mine again, but you still have something better, damn you.”

  “I do, don’t I? Ana, my heart, put your cheek against mine. I might feel that. Hard. To. Breathe.”

  She did as he said, and he sighed. “Gracias.”

  “Adios, my enemy,” el Ghalib said.

  “Adios. Yussef?”

  “What now?”

  “Don’t trust Felipe Palacios,” Santiago said, straining to speak as the paralysis clawed higher at his lungs. “He wants Hanneke’s dowry. He won’t have it.”

  “You will prevent that from beyond the grave?”

  “I will. I have.”

  “You can work a miracle? You are a dead man.”

  “I know.”

  What was left to say? El Ghalib bowed to Ana. “I will fulfill your wish.”

  In mere minutes they were alone except for Pablo, who stood apart, her true knight. Mama cat in his arms, her kitten hopped about in the snow.

  Ana touched Santiago’s face and kissed him. To her dismay, he was beyond kissing her back. She cradled him in her arms and rocked back and forth. He tried to open his eyes and failed. His lips moved. She put her ear close to his mouth.

  “I love you, Ana.”

  “I love you, husband.”

  He may have died then, or it may have been later, when she finally realized he no longer gave her any warmth. She tried to rise, but her dress was frozen to Santiago by his blood. Sobbing, she yanked on her dress until she was free.

  Pablo helped her arrange Santiago’s cloak over his body, anchoring it down with snow. She hoped el Ghalib would fulfill the rest of her bargain with the necklace. The thought of leaving Santiago here with no protection from scavenging animals tore at her heart. In this, as in all other matters of her life since those two damnable priests arrived at Hans Aardema’s house in Vlissingen, she had no choice.

  She knelt one final time by her husband’s body and rested her cheek on his chest. The silence within battered her own beating heart.

  As the sun rose, Hanneke and Pablo started walking toward the pass, the kitten tucked safely in with its mother once more. They held hands, each looking back when they thought the other wasn’t watching. The sky was clear now, almost painfully blue.

  “Do you hear thunder, dama?”

  They both looked back where they had last seen the Almohades and saw the riders. “What should we do?” Pablo asked.

  Hanneke turned to face the army galloping toward them from the east. The worst had happened. She feared nothing.

  “We will wait for them. I suppose El Ghalib changed his mind. If you want to run, Pablo, I can slow them down.”

  “Never! I promised Señor Gonzalez that I would protect you,” he said, shocked.

  “You did, my true knight.” She covered her face with her hands, praying to Padre Celestial that she would remember every moment of her brief life with Santiago Gonzalez, praying that she would be brave, no matter what el Ghalib did to her.

  They stood shoulder to shoulder, even when the army drew close enough for them to see it was the Knights of Calatrava, sent south on a rescue mission by peddlers, searching for survivors.

  Part II

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Had she known a rescue would harrow up her heart, Hanneke would have sent Pablo ahead by himself and stayed with Santiago until she froze. Couldn’t Don Ruy Díaz, master of the Knights of Calatrava, understand that she didn’t want to speak of what happened? He expected answers and she had none, except that her husband had died in her arms and she was a stranger in a harsh land.

  She covered her face with her hands and trembled as Don Diaz asked gentle question after question. She wanted to scream at him to stop, but her mother hadn’t raised her to be so impolite. All she could do was shut out the sight of him and tremble.

  “Let me try, Don Díaz.”

  She tensed when an arm went around her shoulders and someone smelling of both incense and the oil of chain mail pulled her close.

  “It’s too much, isn’t it?”

  Another question, but she could answer this one with a nod, her hands still covering her eyes. She heard this man with the quiet voice
speaking softly to Don Díaz.

  “We will take you to the others,” the man said. “We stopped there first. Antonio Baltierra sent us on.”

  She took her hands away. “He lives?”

  “They all do,” Don Díaz said. “They made it through the pass and El Ghalib seemed disinclined to follow.” He looked away. “That, I do not understand. Why would he not follow us. It would have been so easy.”

  “We kept him busy, Santiago and I,” she said, as her heart broke some more. “He couldn’t move and his chain mail was split up the back. They destroyed his spine with an ax.”

  “You stayed with him to the end,” the more comforting man said. She heard the respect in his voice, and wondered if he was a priest.

  “Claro,” she said, then sagged against him. “I grieve for him. Please just let me grieve for him. It is a small thing I ask,” was the last thing she remembered saying.

  When she revived from her faint, she was sitting in front of the kind soldier on his warhorse, his cloak around them both. She looked around for Pablo. “Pablo?” she asked, alarmed.

  “He’s riding farther behind us. He has a mother cat and a kitten.” He chuckled at that.

  She nodded because it made perfect sense, even though nothing else did. The light was nearly gone from the sky, but the clouds had puffed away and the moon rose. The land was white and oddly uniform. How did they know which way to travel?

  “Where are we?” she asked. Then, “Pardon me, but what is your name? Are you a priest?”

  “Father Anselmo a su servicio, señora,” he replied. “Some of us are priests, who ride with the Knights of Calatrava. We are about through the pass ourselves, nearly to the monastery of Santo Gilberto.”

  “Father, I don’t remember a monastery there,” she said, thinking of last summer, and warmth, and a newly aroused awareness of her husband who now lay dead under his cloak and a mound of snow. Please, El Ghalib, take Santiago with you back to Las Claves. Do what I asked, she begged in her mind and heart, knowing better than to mention El Ghalib, not to the Knights of Calatrava, who had suffered so much at the hands of the Almohades. In a curious way, she was now bound to El Ghalib, like it or not. He had honored her wish; he deserved her silence.

  “It is an old ruin,” Padre Anselmo told her, “destroyed five hundred years ago when the Moors began their conquest.”

  She vaguely remembered walls and rubble. How could anyone stay there? She thought back to their mad dash from Las Claves and knew even a ruin might offer some puny protection. She reminded herself that she lived in a world of low expectations. She had none, herself, but others might still have retained a few. Good for them. She sighed, dreading her arrival at Santo Gilberto and more questions. How many times would she have to tell her sad story? Once seemed too much.

  She would tell Antonio. Before he could not talk, Santiago had urged her to speak to him; why, she did not know. The question was too large for her brain, so she closed her eyes and slept.

  “Take her gently.”

  She woke to find herself in Antonio’s arms. All she could do was burrow closer to him, relieved to her very soul that he lived. Carlos stood at his side, ugly, wounded Carlos, whose one remaining eye was a mere slit in his swollen face.

  “I’ll find you a place, Ana,” Antonio said. “Thank God you are alive.”

  He turned his attention to Don Díaz, who had dismounted. “Before God and all the saints, I am more than grateful that you are here, sir knight,” Antonio said. “We have great need of you, as you can see.”

  Don Gonzalo rested his hands on Antonio and Hanneke in his arms. “Strange are the ways of the Lord Almighty. How curious is His will, to send the message of your need through two Jewish peddlers.” Hanneke saw his respect when his eyes rested on her. “They spoke of a brave woman at Las Claves.”

  “Santiago put her in charge when we rode out, and she did not fail us.”

  “Take good care of this one,” the master of Calatrava said, making it more than a suggestion.

  Antonio bowed his head, but his words relieved her heart. “Months ago, Santiago commended her to my watch, when he was elsewhere. He never rescinded it. Rest assured I will continue to fulfill that order, Don Díaz.”

  Followed by Pablo, Antonio carried her into a ruin with stone walls but no ceiling. Some of the villagers gathered around him, the women with questions. When they looked and did not see Santiago, they began to wail.

  The mourning followed her through one room and another until he found a corner where a campfire burned. When he set her down, Hanneke drew herself into a ball and pulled her cloak over her head, shutting out everyone. She heard him talking to the women. “Give me a moment,” she heard. “Please. I insist.” The voices stopped.

  Antonio sat down beside her, his hand on her head. “I have to know,” he said finally. “Why are you still alive?”

  Hanneke owed him the story. She pulled the cloak off her face and sat up. She looked around the cell-like room, which mercifully had three walls, even if no ceiling. The floor was broken tile, and cold.

  How could she object when his arm went around her? They were comrades in suffering from her earlier heartache, which, terrible as it was, bore no resemblance to the yawning cavern of her new loss.

  “I will only speak of it once,” she said.

  “That is all I ask. Then you need to know something else.”

  As she forced her tired mind to find words to describe the sight of her husband lying so twisted in snow turning red around him, she heard someone at the entrance to her pathetic sanctuary. She wanted to turn away when she saw Felipe Palacios, wretched coward. It was no figment of her imagination that Antonio’s arm involuntarily tightened around her.

  “I am glad to see you,” Felipe said, coming closer, bowing a little, abasing himself in strange fashion. “I will take care of you, now that Santiago is no more.”

  “Go away,” she said softly. “Leave me alone with Antonio Baltierra.”

  Like an irritating itch under her skin, he wouldn’t quit. “You need to understand your situation. With Manolo dead, God rest his soul” – he crossed himself, the soul of piety – “and Rodrigo so tiny and Engracia, well, Engracia, I have put myself in charge of Las Claves.”

  “That in no way affects me,” Hanneke said quietly. “I wish you well in your new acquisition.”

  She could have picked a kinder word than acquisition, but none came to mind in any language. Where had this coward been when Santiago needed every man? What venom had he fed into his silly sister’s ear about Santiago sending Manolo to his death? She trusted him not even slightly.

  Still he stood there, his hands together so piously. “Please leave me alone,” she said. “What I have to say is for Antonio’s ears only.” Might as well assure Felipe where he stood in her estimation, not that it mattered. “Antonio was brave enough to fight for Las Claves, and I consider him the leader of the soldiers. If something changes that, then so be it. Please leave us.”

  What could he do? He left, but not without a backward glance that suggested the matter wasn’t closed. His eyes narrowed when he glared at Antonio, and she felt great unease. Maybe she should apologize to Felipe for her plain speaking, blaming it on the shock of her husband’s death. Later; it could wait.

  “You have not made a friend there,” Antonio said.

  “He never was,” she replied. “Not since Valladolid, when he tried to…to…insinuate himself into my life. I will never trust him.”

  “That is two of us.” He relaxed his grip on her shoulders. “Tell me what you wish. I would like to give you space, time and comfort in which to grieve, but we have none of those luxuries at present.”

  She understood him completely. “Let me tell you this: El Ghalib and his army are retaking Las Claves now. I’m certain you are aware of that. It was his goal all along.”

 
“I know. We are waiting for more soldiers here. When they arrive – if they arrive – we will march on Las Claves again.” He held himself off from her to appraise her. “I am astounded that El Ghalib did not at the very least hold you for ransom.”

  “I thought as much.” She rested her head against Antonio’s chest. “My story begins when I killed Jawhara. Listen, please.”

  She took a deep breath, folded Santiago into her heart where he could give her courage, and began, leaving out nothing. She stopped when tears overwhelmed her. Antonio held her close and crooned to her in those moments. Several times, he looked up and spoke softly to someone in the door, who left.

  “I gave the necklace back to El Ghalib and asked that he let me hold my husband until his death,” she whispered.

  “I cannot imagine that pleased your husband,” Antonio said, with just a shred of humor.

  “You know it didn’t,” she said, and felt her heart lift a little, but only a little. “He wanted me to ask for my own safe passage. Personally, I didn’t care what became of me once he was gone.”

  “This is hard to hear, Ana,” Antonio said. She thought she heard the pain of a man’s loss of his friend. “I wish to God matters had fallen out differently.”

  Maybe someday she could look on this whole wretched turn of events with something approaching resigned philosophy, but now was not the time. “I pressed my luck and asked El Ghalib to see that Manolo and Santiago were buried at Las Claves, with Santiago next to Fermina. He said he would, because they were heading there.”

  “And not to attack us here,” Antonio said, and she heard the relief. “With the Knights gathered, and other soldiers expected soon, we will retake Las Claves.”

  She was silent, wondering why anyone wanted Las Claves. Antonio seemed to sense what she was thinking. “We have been going back and forth with the Almohades for years,” he told her. “The time has come to stand. Santiago and I felt it all over Spain, as we traveled and recruited this fall.”

  “But this winnowing,” she said. “I hate it.”

  She smelled blood on her hands and clothing, and felt despair so overpowering that she could think of nothing beyond her husband’s last look into her eyes. Santiago had showed her something worse than fear: regret. She knew now that last look was regret, as time ran out.